There was some good news for the people of Sunderland last month when local councillors managed to stop a small business from opening. They had received an application to open a Mexican takeaway restaurant on premises formerly occupied by a dog grooming salon on Tunstall Village Road. Spotting the words ‘Mexican cuisine’ in the temporary change of use application, the council concluded that the company would ‘not support or improve the health and wellbeing of local communities’ and turned it down.
Those who live in and around Tunstall Village Road may have been saved from having burritos within walking distance, but the residents of less fortunate communities remain at risk. The Times has just ‘revealed’ that Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) has been ‘thwarting efforts to stop fast-food outlets near schools’. According to Stephen Turnbull, Wakefield council’s director of public health, this has made his team ‘depressed’.
It is a terrible policy and we should raise a glass to KFC for fighting them on our behalf
Mr Turnbull is one of England’s 130 public health directors. The job of these health directors, handsomely remunerated with salaries well over £100,000, is to make a nuisance of themselves at council meetings, waffling about ‘health inequalities’ and objecting whenever anyone tries to open an off licence or kebab shop. During the pandemic they were about as much use as a chocolate teapot because they don’t know much about infectious disease. They don’t know about non-infectious diseases for that matter, except that they are caused by capitalism.
The complaint of Mr Turnbull and his depressed team is that whenever they, or another council, try to stop KFC from opening a shop, KFC points out that a ban would be unlawful and not grounded in evidence. External planning inspectors are then brought in to adjudicate and often they agree with the company. In effect, their beef is with the rule of law. They want to make arbitrary and capricious decisions that restrict freedom of choice and potentially cost jobs and they appear to be annoyed that the system won’t always let them.
KFC is certainly correct when it says that such bans are unscientific. ‘Public health’ academics have tried desperately hard to find evidence that living near a fast food outlet makes people more likely to be obese, but have come up empty-handed. Dozens of studies have been conducted and no such association appears to exist. Zoning restrictions are popular with local busybodies not because they are evidence-based but because they are among the few policies that can be implemented at the local level.
Wakefield council is one of many councils that bans new fast food outlets opening within 400 metres of schools in an attempt to tackle the imaginary epidemic of childhood obesity. The problem is that if you live in a town or city you are never far from a school. Schools tend to be located where people live. Food shops are located in the same places for the same reason. A ban on fast food outlets within 400 metres of a school in London would ban them pretty much everywhere except in the River Thames – where there isn’t much footfall.
It is a terrible policy and we should raise a glass to KFC for fighting them on our behalf. Mr Turnbull, meanwhile, gives us an insight into the mind of the modern puritan when he says: ‘We can’t control everyone’s lives and we don’t want to control those people’s lives, but people can’t make healthy choices when there’s a takeaway straight outside the school.’ This is obviously untrue. The more options that are available, the more choice we have. His real concern is that if we have the choice of eating a chicken bucket, some of us will do so. That is so intolerable to him that the force of law must be used to ensure that only the ‘healthy choices’ remain.
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